Pull-out menus, also known as pull-down menus, are well known in the art and are possibly one of the most common tools in a graphical user interface (GUI). From a pull-down menu, a user can issue a computer command, initiate an action, set parameters for a particular operation, etc.
Since the pull-down menu structure is so popular, occasionally the entire viewing screen is not sufficient to display all of the menu options, i.e., panels, available to the user. This is particularly true if each of the menu panels occupies a large area on the screen so as to provide the user with a readable, easy to understand format. In this case, the user must scroll the display past the current view, either in the vertical or horizontal direction, in order to create a viewing area where the additional panels can be seen. This scrolling operation may be inconvenient and time consuming for the user.
Furthermore, traditional pull-down menus feature cascading menus which are typically sub-menus pertaining to a particular panel within the main menu. Each sub-menu can have several of its own sub-menus, and so on. There can thus be many levels of sub-menus, each relating to a panel in the “parent” menu. In this case, the viewing area on the screen may not be sufficient to provide space for each panel while allowing the user to comprehend its contents. Scrolling the sub-menus off the screen presents difficulties in addition to those mentioned, since the user may “lose” track of where he or she is in the overall scheme of things (i.e., which panel this particular sub-menu is related to).
Additionally, many user intensive applications such as a business intelligence study need to display a large amount of information in a readily accessible manner, including for example charts, forms for setting parameters, maps, pictures and videos. Each of these takes up space on the display, which thus becomes unmanageable. Some predictive analytics applications, for example, have hundreds of variables that can be set by the user and are used in analyses for a single decision, thus, giving analysts a cumbersome amount of data to be viewed. Traditional menus and display panels are intrusive and difficult to present in the context of the user's interaction with the main display. These menus and panels are also distracting to the user due to the excess amount of information presented at one time.
Therefore, a need exists to overcome the above disadvantages of current menu approaches and information display structures.